Hi,
Thanks so much for your kind words about Events Manager.
I don’t think there will be a Facebook importer in the near future. Although it’s a feature that’s been requested before the developers are currently working on a number of important bug fixes as well as better integration with WPML, so a Facebook importer is some way down the list.
Thanks for your answer! OK, that’s really a bummer for us since we cannot transfer each date form various facebook accounts manually to EM. Just because it would take ages…
Hm, do you think it’s a task a programmer could solve easily? Perhaps we can find someone for this… If not, I don’t know if we can stick to EM – but this would be really bad.
I’m not a Facebook user so forgive me if this a stupid question, but is an RSS feed generated of your events? If so, you could probably do something using that.
Another option would to try using one of the Facebook connect plugins – someone mentioned using one on the Pro forums a while back. Not sure how well they got on, but it’s worth looking into.
I’m not a real facebook user either 🙂 But a lot of “our” colleagues are… And they want to contribute their dates to our platform. I know that it is possible to generate RSS feeds from facebook fan pages (pages liked by me).
See: http://www.itworld.com/it-management/410122/how-make-facebook-page-rss-list-6-easy-steps
We also thought about generating ESS-feeds (event syndikcation standard) out of these RSS-feeds because events manager can import ESS. But we couldn’t get an event-feed out of facebook up to now (i.e. only the events without status messages etc.). And we couldn’t find a tool to convert RSS into ESS…
So I don’t have an idea how to solve this. And don’t have an idea how to solve this with the Facebook Connect Plugin for WordPress either. Is there any suggestion in Pro Forums?
No, unfortunately not – that’s where I got the idea of using a Facebook Connect plugin…
If you could support ical format import Facebook does offer an ical link for events and birthdays
Hy, sounds good. We would really appreciate this because we’re still searching for a solution for importing events from facebook etc. to Events Manager.
I again did some deeper research around the net: and got in touch with the developer of EME (Events Made Easy) – a fork of Events Manager. He already has a facebook import but it’s too much effort for him to adapt it to EM compatibility. His answer:
“The current version [of EME] can’t sync to EM, because all function calls are different. While it would probably be possible to change the code, you’ll understand that I can’t spend my free time to code up something that the EM developers should do.”
Of course, he’s right. Any thoughts on this? Thanks a lot!
As I have a need for this for a church site I’m working on I have pulled together some code to pull the Facebook webcal link.
This currently is in Alpha (infant, early, buggy-likely) phase but works with a few URLs that I’ve put at it.
http://kittell.net/code/php-facebook-webcal-parse/
Import Process – Public Events:
- record in wp_posts
- Record to to replicate a manually entered public event
- record in wp_em_locations for each location
- This could be a trickier part
- If you only use it for one location this is simple
and wouldn’t need to be touched other than to have the
ID.
- If you do have different locations initially I’d
suggest creating the location in WordPress first and
then when you do the Facebook event make sure you have
the location_name in the database to be the location in
the Facebook event.
- Possibly the easiest part, need to replicate a manually
entered event
vaid000 the Facebook Events Importer plugin will do the trick. You can use the code examples to add the imported events to your events template.
Facebook event field’s are pretty easy to add. e.g.
<?php
/* display location */
fbe_field('location');
/* use location as variable */
$var = get_fbe_field('location');
?>
<?php
$event_starts = get_fbe_date('event_starts','M j, Y @ g:i a');
$event_ends = get_fbe_date('event_ends','M j, Y @ g:i a');
?>
If you need to integrate it directly into another calendar systems post-type I can offer some direction in that regards as well.
